SANTA CRUZ, CA. January 12, 2016 - Security is and has been the number one issue for mobile development for many years, but a recent Evans Data survey of mobile developers worldwide shows that 56.7% of mobile developers are following security protocols mandated by their government. This is especially true in North America, where 67% use protocols that the federal government has specified for authentication and digital signatures. Use in Asia was only slightly less while only a third in the EMEA region follow government guidelines.

The most common potential security issues that developers have encountered in the last year are authentication without using HTTPS, and weak server side controls – both cited by 43% of the developers. In the United States, the OMB guidelines advocate use of HTTPS for authentication, but those guidelines do not necessarily apply to non-government sites. For enterprise developers, data leakage and network level security issues compete with data tampering in transit as issues.

"Security is critical today in all forms of software development, but there are more vulnerabilities when it comes to mobile," said Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data. "Encryption during transport over the network is one of the issues peculiar to mobility that is particularly of concern to developers, but so is encryption for data at rest on the device. As mobile devices become the de facto standard for the client, these issues have become more pressing."

The survey focuses on a wide range of topics related to mobile development including use of APIs, monetization, development for Android, development for iOS, and Windows Phone development, carriers, mobility in the corporate enterprise, design practices, wearables, Internet of Things and Cloud in mobile development. It was conducted worldwide with professional software developers active in development for mobile devices and provides a margin of error of 4%.

See the complete Table of Contents and Methodology here: Table of Contents

Evans Data Corporation provides regularly updated IT industry market intelligence based on in-depth surveys of the global developer population. Evans' syndicated research includes surveys focused on developers in a wide variety of subjects.

Copyright 2016 Evans Data Corporation. All other company names, products and services mentioned in this document are the trademarks and property of their respective owners.

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